When We Make Art, the Ways We Love the World Are Not Wasted

I got to speak as a part of a religious service for the first time ever last month, at Congregation Kol Ami. I spoke on creativity, of course. Here's an excerpt that I hope you'll enjoy:

There is a true intimacy that can occur between a person who writes and a person who reads, a kind of mind meld, when the writer has done a good enough job to enable the reader to dream a version of the dream the writer has created in her own mind and put on the page.
 
When I was a kid, sometimes I lounged on a daybed in the living room. Above me hung a large pastel drawing by Norman LaLiberte. At its center, in a gold-bordered cameo, sat the head and shoulders of an august-looking, bearded patriarch—the classic Judeo-Christian image of god. Below this figure, people gathered amid shrines, hands upraised, offering supplication. A statement was written on top of the images, in bold black capitals: “Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, it is my opinion that art lost its creative urge the moment it was separated from worship. Ingmar Bergman”
 
I read that inscription and wondered: What is the difference between a belief, a doubt, and an opinion? I didn’t understand then that the screenwriter and director Ingmar Bergman meant religious beliefs and doubts, which differ from opinions. But I did understand what both the artist and the filmmaker were claiming: that making art is, at its best, an act of supplication to greater forces, of honoring the divine in everything.
 
All humans have sensitivity; we all need to make sense of our experience in ways that can be shared. There are truths to plumb and questions to unveil and sufferings to unravel. Those with the freedom and courage to bring works to completion and cast them into the world may receive the validation of being understood by strangers, maybe even a narrow rivulet or small puddle of money. Yet regardless of rewards or the lack thereof, there is a joy in having antennae that are finely attuned to the vibrations of life, to the injustices and the beauty. We need these people to tell us what they know; and we are all these people.
 
I feel most aligned with my life’s purpose when writing my own work. I find deep value in shaping awareness and in knowing that others may become immersed in my representations of life, that they may understand what I mean to convey and may offer me, by reading it, their company. I mean to pay homage to life. L’chaim. In attempting to hone something that I can share, I feel, strangely, that my life is not wasted.
 
Which brings me back to Bergman and LaLiberte. Valuing and shaping one’s experiences and perceptions and sharing them with others, whether these others are grandchildren or strangers, is a necessary and profound part of life. For all but the blessed few, paying work rarely offers meaning of the sort that makes life feel fully lived. Even raising a family, as rich, beautiful, crucial, and challenging as this is, may leave one sometimes hollow. Having the chance to express how we experience life—whether in writing, sounds, speeches, paint, or movement, in abstract formulas or physical matter—and to experience others’ honest efforts to do this deepens life and is a form of giving homage.
 
Humans are made for making art, by which I mean exploring how we experience our lives and creating meanings from that, in forms others can perceive—for sustenance, for enjoyment, for opening the minds of others, and for enhancing compassion—which is the capacity, above all, that makes the world an honorable place.
 
What do you see and know? What do you, uniquely you, have inside that you can share? In what form can you share this with others, so they might understand? Effective work bears the force of an individual’s courageous answers to those questions. What is a calling, but those answers clamoring to be expressed?
 
Answer them first for yourself, to sort out your life’s experience. Do it for other living beings who may pass the same ways you have. And do it, as Bergman exhorts, as a way of worshipping what you value as most high. . . . We honor the large and the small, the divine in all its manifestations throughout the earth. By sharing what you care about, what you honor, with others, by passing along this awareness of what matters, you can feel the joy of knowing that the ways you love the world are not wasted.